In short, the emerging collaborative idea that we’re working round the clock on is called The 50/50 Project….and it’s really close to being ready for first release. There’s a sneak preview of the web platform supporting it in his post.

Over the last 10 days, and in particular over the weekend, a team of amazing people from all sorts of backgrounds have come together to work on it. We’ve had nearly 100 ideas submitted over at Good By Ideas, and people ‘claiming’ those ideas – to make them, support them and push them out into their networks already.

Some of you may have seen it the short clip on the BBC’s Click programme over the weekend – if not, take a quick peek (it’s at 22 minutes!).

We’re now keen to keep the momentum going with an open challenge/experiment to makers, creators, artists, musicians, brand owners, companies – anyone who can create, donate or push out big, interesting fundraising ideas – all with one collaborative purpose -> to rapidly accelerate donations by creatively bringing this issue up in people’s minds in a way that makes them want to give and get involved.

It’s a 50 day mission starting on August 27th and ending on World Food Day on October 16th to raise £1m-£50 through interesting fundraising projects. All money will be channelled into DEC who have the knowhow and capability to make the best use of it. All donations will be tracked in 1 place. We’ll share, amplify and measure everything – and especially the stories from East Africa and from the projects – so we can create impact and scale around the efforts.

It’s called 50/50 because it’s make or break

Life is quite literally in the balance over there

And frankly, it’s 50/50 that it will work. It’s a massive challenge, and one that requires an enormous dose of empathy, creativity and action from lots of people to have a chance of succeeding. The kind of empathy we’ve seen in the past week on a much smaller scale following the London riots.

The thing is we’ve got no idea how much we could possibly raise if we can tap into the global creative communities amazing talents. But given the number of people in danger of starving, we really want to have a go…and are optimistic that something amazing could happen.

The one simple thing we did calculate was that within our combined networks, if we can each get 1 in 20 of the people we know to give £10, we’ll get to over £1million. Assuming we all know c. 200 people each, that means you need to get 10 people to give £10 and we’ve hit the first target. And that’s before we get any of the amazing fundraising ideas kicking in that can spread further and faster….

So, keep watching this space for more news this week. Things are moving fast, so get your ideas or claim and idea and get your networks primed and ready. It’s important, it’s exciting and it’s happening so get involved and let’s see what happens.